Learning Languages

April 20, 2008

To illustrate the difference between simplicity and simplemindedness, I'll use the example of learning a new language (we can generalize later and look at learning a new subject, say AOP, design patterns, or SOA - anything that is not trivial and totally new to you - how do you approach the task simply but not simplemindedly).

How would you proceed in a simple, but not simplistic, fashion? The differences between simple and simplistic are not always obvious. A simplistic approach appears to be simple, but it would fail to accomplish the goal of acquiring the new knowledge, resulting in frustration and abandonment of the original goal. Many people quit learning a new language because most learning and teaching techniques are either simplistic or too complex.

If you believe in simplicity you would follow the simplest approach that could possibly work, as the XP proponents say. One simple approach could be (and different people would chose different approaches, there is no "one right way"), to use the so-called "learn the way children learn approach".

At first glance, it sounds attractive. Children absorb the sounds, words, sentences, and grammar, without going through structured series of lessons. They just do it! So lets emulate that.

One company that follows this approach is RosettaStone. They have a web site that teaches over 30 languages using that exact methodology. It appears very attractive, particularly because they use the same approach for all the languages, and there is no geometric explosion of language pairs. You teach a Chinese person French the same way you teach it to an American. No Chinese, or English is used! Only the target language (French) is used.

I gave it a spin to learn Spanish. There was a lot I liked. You learn mainly through pictures. There is no translation at all. There are no grammar lessons. You see the picture, hear it read aloud, figure out the meaning from the picture and start learning sentence patterns quite quickly.

After a couple of months of trying that I found that I wasn't making much progress. So I tried to analyze where the method failed me. I realized quickly that I could parrot some sentences, but I couldn't construct any new ones. I also discovered, that part of the "simplification" was omitting parts of the grammar they considered "difficult", like, the past tense! They had tens of sentences with the perfect tenses, so you could say, the equivalent of, "I have eaten", but you can't say, "I ate". You can say, "why haven't you called me", but you can't say, "why didn't you call me". That is fine, if you are concerned only about what you say! But if someone else says, "what did you eat last night", you wouldn't understand them, because the past tense does not exist at RosettaStone. The past tense! It is too complex!

Now that, in a nutshell, is simplification without simplicity. Totally vacuous, pointless, and counter productive.

Drilling down a bit deeper in the method, I discovered that the whole course is a set of 8400 sentences, each one illustrated with a picture. That's it. No grammar, no rules of any sort. Exactly like a child learns. But I am not a child, and I don't have 5 years to reach a stage where I can just do baby talk! In a year or so, I would like to be able to read a newspaper, listen to network news, read Don Quixote De La Mancha in the original, and converse with educated people.

I tried some of the other languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese, and Korean. The method totally fails, because it does not use a transcription system at all. The original script is used (and your knowledge of it is assumed!). So to learn Arabic you have to, somehow, acquire the knowledge of the Arabic script outside or RosettaStone. Same for Hindi, Hebrew, Chinese, and the other non-Roman Alphabet languages. Apparently it was too hard to go this far on the simplicity-for-the-user scale. They would have to invent one a transcription scheme for each of the language. For Arabic, inventive teens have come with a Roman Alphabet scheme that is awesome, to help them text message and to IM. Probably something like that exists in Hindi and Chinese.

So my assessment of the RosettaStone method was that its simplicity is really simple mindedness. Not only that, but where it really was needed (a transcription system that equalized all the languages) it totally failed and went back to the original complexity.

So I decided to start over (one of the rules of simplicity). I sketched out a program for learning Spanish, that, to me, was simple, but not simple minded. It has several phases, it was layered, modular, and incremental.

Here's my method in a nutshell. The following steps apply to Roman Alphabet based languages. To learn a non-Roman Alphabet language like Hindi, or Hebrew, I would have to add a step to locate a Roman Alpha pet transcription scheme as step 0. If I can't find it, I wouldn't embark on learning that language.

1. An exploratory phase. Listen to Spanish radio, watch Spanish TV, get a Spanish magazine, or newspaper. Get a feel for the sounds, words, and letters of the language. Very quickly assess if you like the language or not and size up the task ahead. Spanish would appear much less daunting than Hebrew, or Hindi. At least the letters are recognizable, and you can even attempt to read the words, as if they were English words.

2. Ear training phase. Get some CDs for "learning in your car". Listen to the sounds of the new language. Acquire basic phrases (maybe a few dozen phrases). Good morning, Good evening, Hello, How are you?, My name is, What is your name, Please repeat, I did not understand, You are speaking too fast, What does that xxx mean in English, How do you say yyy in Spanish, etc. At this stage you don't want to dive into anything more complex (like grammar, or writing).

3. Basic vocabulary phase: Acquire a basic vocabulary of maybe a few hundred words, and a few more phrases. Again ignoring grammar. Build a basic facility with the language based on rote memorization.

4. Grammar phase. After finishing the previous phases, with a minimal investment of time, you would realize whether you want to go forward or not. I could not continue with Hindi or Hebrew. I realized how much investment of time that would require! This is a decision point. To go forward you can't just keep memorizing phrases, the number of possible phrases in a language is infinite. You need to learn how to construct sentences correctly. And that requires grammar. There is no avoiding it. Speaking and writing requires generating new sentences from words based on the rules of correct construction. Even for understanding you need the parsing skill. But for speaking and writing you need the generative skill that you can get only from grammar. You don't want native speakers to laugh every time you speak! This is the hardest phase of learning a new language. You just have to hunker down and do it. Learn the rules. Apply the rules.

5. Listening Skills phase. After acquiring basic vocabulary and grammar, you will still find that it is hard to watch Spanish TV, and to listen to CNN in Spanish. You still need several thousand words of vocabulary - probably 5000. What is the simplest way to acquire them? How do you pick the 5000 words you need? Best way is to find a list arranged by frequency of use. You then approach it in an incremental manner: 1st 100, 2nd 200, 3rd 300, etc. Since the order is by frequency of use, you are learning the first 100 most used words, then the first 200 most used words, etc. A simple approach that would be simpleminded is to just and read the dictionary and learn words alphabetically. You may learn 5000 words, but they won't be the 5000 most people use! Another simpleminded approach is to learn cognates just because they are simple. Cognates are words that look the same (or almost the same) and mean the same, but sound different (like color), or all words ending in "tion", can be similar but end in "cion".

6. Writing Phase At this stage you can chat and probably write email, and you can try your hand at composing simple passages.

7. Speaking Phase By speaking I mean engaging in a dialog, not "pass the salt please", or "where is the nearest bank", or "I would like fries with that".

I leave the speaking to the end, because it is the phase that integrates all the others.

The rules of simplicity come in handy when trying to learn something new.